ALERT!

I am not sure how recent this is but I was doing some searches tonight and I am finding significant (compared to the last few months) amount of F availability US-Japan. Quite a few days with 2F available that previously were blocked. If you have been looking for JL F I would suggest now is a good time to check.

Strange situation?
 

Thanks!

This has left me in a strange situation. Sorry if this is confusing -- I'll try to explain as best as I can.

I have an award booked for SFO-SEA-ORD-NRT, NRT-BKK.

After seeing this message, I searched and found availability for what I really wanted: SFO-HND, NRT-BKK leaving SFO a day earlier than the old reservation.

I didn't want to pay a $125 change fee (still MVP) so instead I decided to book this one as well, without canceling the old one. I figured that, since I'd be gold in a month, I'd just cancel the old one then (I hate to tie up award space unnecessarily, but not as much as I hate to pay $125)

Note that these flights overlap -- it's impossible for me to take both. However, it confirmed and ticketed. I was a bit surprised, but, I do, indeed, have a JL locator and ticket number in my email.

But, when I try to view the new reservation on the website, it gives an error and says it can't be viewed online. When I pull up my account in the AS app, it gives an error trying to sync the trips.

So, I called AS. The agent found the new reservation, said it had confirmed and ticketed, and had 3 (!!) segments on it. There were the correct SFO-HND and NRT-BKK segments, as well as a third segment 3 weeks later between two airport codes that I had never heard of (and don't remember). I told her that those didn't belong there. She didn't know what that segment was, noted that it was not in the itinerary (I don't know exactly where she was seeing it -- I guess it was ticketed?) and so she deleted it, and said it didn't effect anything else.

Then she said that it was showing a "web failure" and it had to be re-issued by an agent. I'm not sure exactly what that means. She suspected that it was because of the overlapping reservations.

She confirmed that I DID have two valid, ticketed reservations , and I was free to hang onto both for a month, and then when I become Gold, cancel the 2nd one, and call in to get the first one re-issued. She assured me that, because I had a valid ticket number from JL, the award space was held and it wasn't going anywhere.

However, she did not sound as sure of herself as I would have liked, so I thought I'd draw on the collective wisdom and experience here... does anyone know what's going on here? Is my award space really safe if I follow through on my plan of waiting a month before cancelling the old one and getting them to fix the new one? If I absolutely need to pay $125 to cancel now in order to secure the new itinerary I will...

I recently booked an EK award with the mysterious additional city pairs as well (listed as in AS flight). These city pairs were not real airports, and the flight number is not in use by AS.

Did an agent delete that segment? If so, did the deletion have any adverse effects?

Ok, so, I spoke to another agent today, and he mentioned that he could cancel the old reservation and send me the ticket number. Then I could deposit the ticket, and get the miles + fees (except the $12.50 of course) back after I'm gold, and not pay the fee.

So I got him to do that. The trip disappeared from "my trips" but I didn't get a cancellation email (strange). When I dug up the ticket number from the original confirmation and entered it under "deposit ticket" on the web page, it said that the ticket wasn't available to be canceled online.

I'm hoping that this just sorts itself out and eventually I get an email and I can just redeposit it when I'm gold. At least I have the itinerary that I want ticketed so I'm good to go for my trip in March.

RE: the mystery segment at the end, the agent told me that it's just a "dummy segment" that the computer adds to signify that it's an international award ticket. It reappeared (the agent last night deleted it). They tried deleting it again and it came back up when they pulled the ticket up. So apparently this is just some quirk of how they keep track of international awards internally.

ETA: I got the email (which doesn't say anything about cancellation -- it looks the same as a new reservation conformation email)
But, once I got that, my new reservation was fixed automatically (I can now view it in the app and web page)
Still can't online-cancel/deposit the old ticket. I'm not sure if that's because it's an award ticket, or for some other reason. I can deal with that issue when I make Gold and I'm ready to deposit it and get my miles back!

That sounds vaguely familiar....

Wow... that's awesome.

The best part is that the agents keep deleting it and the computer keeps putting it back.

Ugh, just saw several dates w/ F availability from SFO/LAX in Spring 2019. Tried to book a few different dates and city pairs and get the phantom availability error. :(

It does not say "phantom availability error" does it? Could you elaborate on what exactly the message says? Did you confirm availability with BA and QF? Also, was this a new reservation or were you attempting to change an existing res to F? One segement or two? I am trying to narrow down where people are having problems.

My experience is that if it is a new reservation booked online and AS, QF, and BA all show availability then it should work.

No, it was along the lines of "could not be booked because Alaska couldn't find the availability". I didn't try finding availability w/ BA or QF first, just what AS was showing as F availability on JL flights from SFO/LAX to NRT. Was a new reservation, one segment. Most of the dates that appeared to have F now seem to be gone today.

Thanks for the update. I would guess your experience is the result of AS caching JL award availability. The availability you see may be a few hours out of date. If someone else grabbed the award before you and the AS availability cache has not updated yet you get the "phantom" availability. Checking with BA or QF will let you know if the availability is real.

I do not believe AS caches availability for all date ranges in the schedule since near end of schedule I have seen availability update in real-time (I book an award and the availability disappears immediately) but in the middle of the schedule there is definitely availability caching going on. AS could fix this with live data but maybe their systems or IT staff can't handle it? Without caching data it may be difficult to construct an award calendar in real-time.

I booked one of those :)

It could just be that someone booked it out from under you? I'm not sure how frequently their view into the available space updates. I doubt it's realtime. But I booked a F seat on JL 1 for a date in March that was not there about a month ago, so there was definitely some new space released.

It is probably quite easy to update in real-time to reflect a booking made through AS (they know about the booking immediately so they just update their local cache) but it's probably a lot harder to update to reflect a booking made through someone else. I suspect that they are just pulling data and they are probably limited in how often they can or want to pull the data. But actually I'm just guessing because I have no idea how this works under the hood.